Thursday, August 29, 2013

So much good stuff, what to highlight? 3-D printing overall continues to take off. In June, MakerBot was bought for $403M by industrial printing company Stratsys, demonstrating the industry’s belief in the exploding market for desktop printing for personal use and small businesses.

Tech and expertise barriers to 3-D design continue to fall, as interfaces proliferate to assist in the design process. For example, Doodle3D turns sketches made on a computer, tablet or smartphone into printable 3D design specs. Futurist-entrepreneur Elon Musk has announced he has created a gestural interface for 3D design, to make the process simpler and more intuitive. And MakerBot just introduced a "no-muss, no fuss" 3D scanner.

Every day seems to see news of another application of 3D tech. NASA just successfully tested 3D printed rocket components, with the goal of making space exploration simpler and cheaper. The space agency is also exploring the potential for printing food, to help liven the diet of astronauts on long space missions.

We’ve also seen an explosion of applications of 3-D printing and scanning in museums. Just a few cool examples:

The American Museum of Natural History’s two-week “Capturing Dinosaurs” camp used digital fabrication tools and the museum’s collections to help teens explore paleontology. (At least one teen was inspired to consider a career combining paleo and tech—see his remarks in the video, below. “I can do this!”)

The Science Museum of London used 275 laser scans, yielding over 2 billion measurements, to create a “point cloud” map of their shipping galleries before closing them for good, to be replaced by a new “Information Age” exhibit. The scans will enable the Museum to create a detailed virtual tour of the old galleries, so the experience lives on in some form.

In May, Tony Butler reported from the MuseumNext conference, highlighting Oonagh Murphy’s report on the Newark Museum’s use of 3-D printers to help children engage with the museum, and technology, in a slow and meaningful way.

For a glimpse of where 3D printing is headed in the coming year, see this projection from SmartPlanet talking about the effect of several important patents expiring, fueling the development of cheaper high-quality 3D printers.

I’d love to hear how your museum is using 3D scanning and printing, whether for education, collections care, exhibit fabrication or research. Please share descriptions and links in the comments section, below.

The underlying appeal of wearable tech is the prospect of
seamless integration of connectivity and data into everyday life. No more
fumbling for your smart phone, no more juggling devices or pulling over to the
side of the road to take a safe look at a screen. Wearable tech is one
(significantly less creepy) step short of the Transhumanist’s vision of our
cyborg future, in which technology is actually implanted in our bodies.

This prospect of “seamless integration” has implications for
culture in general and museums in particular:

Norms of Behavior.
We are still working out the etiquette of using mainstream digital devices. In a recent “Dinner Party
Download” podcast one listener asked Lizzie Post and Daniel Post-Senning
(who are, yes, grandchildren of Emily Post) when it was ok for a passenger to
watch a video on their PED, as opposed to conversing with the driver. A friend
of mine pointed out a new custom at restaurants and bars: piling cellphones,
screen down, in the middle of the table, with the understanding that anyone who
break ranks and retrieve their phone during the meal has to pay more than their
share of the tab. What happens when you can’t tell, for sure, whether someone
is looking at their (teeny) screen or connecting to the web? Is pretending to
listen when you are lost in your own thoughts any different than pretending to
listen while secretly checking email? When it comes to museum norms, I’ve heard
from cranky museum enthusiasts who are really irritated by other visitors using
their hand held devices to take pictures, video, text or talk. They feel the
presence of people waving their smart phones around detracts from the museum experience.
(These may or may not be the same people who object to small children playing
on the floor in art galleries, or teenagers flirting and chattering in groups.)
When electronic interfaces become, in effect, invisible, does this irritation
evaporate?

Privacy. Google
Glass and its kin are triggering privacy concerns, since they make it harder to
detect, and object, when users are taking a photo or video. One bar in Seattle
has already made a big deal of proactively
banning Glass, saying “Part of this is a joke, to be funny on Facebook and
get a reaction, but part of it is serious because we don’t let people film
other people or take photos unwanted of other people in the bar because it’s
kind of a private place people go.” Neal pointed out that photographers have
been sneaking photos for decades, sometimes with the help of low-tech covert
gadgets, so this isn’t a new threat. As usual, technology just facilitates an
underlying impulse. Not everyone carries
around a 90° lens
on their cameras—but if we reach a point where as many people are wearing
computing headsets as are currently carrying smartphones, there is a difference
in scale. When WeeJee was taking his photos, ordinary citizens didn’t have
YouTube and Instagram as platforms for sharing their own candid (and
unauthorized) funny vids & pics.

Accessibility

Let’s not forget I was talking to Neal in the “Petting Zoo”
(demo area) of the Tech@LEAD conference, where attendees explored how
technology can facilitate the access people with disabilities have to arts
& culture. A headset that lets you access digital content with voice
commands could be a huge boon to users with disabilities wanting to make full
use of a museum’s resources. (Though, as with most universal design, this
access would probably be appreciated by people without disabilities as well.)

So back to my brief trial of Google Glass. It was a much
more awkward interface than I expected. It was challenging to pronounce words
clearly enough for its voice recognition software (Googling “Elizabeth Merritt” yielded Elizabeth II, married to Prince Philip). Non-voice commands are given by tapping
or sliding your finger along the frame. Maybe this would become more natural
with practice, but if felt a bit transgressive—like compulsively touching my nose.
I could see the tiny projection screen quite clearly, and when I consciously
looked “past” the screen, the display was relatively unobtrusive. Overall
grade: useable but clunky for now, with clear potential for improvement.

Do I think Glass (or its competitors) are about to go
mainstream? Not next year, maybe not the year after, but remember how hard it
is to project the rate of adoption of new technology. We may be at the classic
stage of mocking a new device that is suffering through an unattractive adolescence.
(Ken Olsen, founder and CEO of Digital Equipment Corp., famously remarked in
1977 “There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home." Oops.)
Who would have predicted, when the first smartphone was marketed in 2000, that 56%
of Americans would own at least one of these devices today?

So it’s not too early for museumers to start thinking about
the rise of wearable tech, the implications for society and for museum
practice.

Question of the day:
if you had (or have) Google Glass or the equivalent, how would you use it in a
museum? Do you think it would change the way you use digital resources and online
social networks? Are there things you might do with Glass you wouldn't do with
a hand held digital device?You can follow Neal's adventures through the Google Glass via twitter or Google+.

Thursday, August 22, 2013

I recently read a post on the New York Times blogs about a wiki edit-athon at Smithsonian American Art Museum here in D.C. That prompted me to ping Lori Byrd Phillips, digital marketing coordinator at The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis. Lori first came to my attention as TCM’s Wikipedian in Residence. She’s written for CFM before about Wikipedia and about Open Authority—a term she first defined on this blog—and I invited her to give us an update on museum engagement with all things wiki in the past year or so.

It’s funny how one little blog post can make such a big impact. In April 2011 I shared my thoughts about the importance of Wikipedia and open culture here on the Center for the Future of Museums blog. The post, “Museums & Wikipedia: The Future of Collaboration and Accessibility,” became an important stepping stone for the growing GLAM-Wiki initiative—an international community of Wikipedians and cultural professionals who guide Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums in collaborating with the world’s largest online encyclopedia. I elaborated on the GLAM-Wiki initiative in the fall 2011 Museum magazine. The Wikipedian in Residence model was included in the inaugural 2012 edition of CFM’s TrendsWatch report, just as we were preparing to present at the AAM Annual Meeting in Minneapolis. We consider that meeting in 2012—one year after that initial blog post—to be the “watershed moment” for the GLAM-Wiki initiative. We had the sense that the broader museum community now understood why Wikipedia would be relevant within our organizations.

We could not have been more appreciative of the platform provided by the AAM Annual Meeting, where we presented both an in-person panel and a virtual session called “Wikipedia in the Museum: Lessons from Wikipedians in Residence.” Coming from the U.S., Australia and Spain, five Wikipedians in Residence arrived in Minneapolis expecting to convince attendees about the importance of museums engaging the wiki world. But we quickly found that the question was no longer, “Why Wikipedia?” but “How do we do this?” (If you are still curious about the “Why?” read my first blog post.) From surprise mentions in other presentations to an enthusiastic response to our own sessions, we definitely felt the WikiLove.

Fortunately, we were prepared to answer the “How?” question. In 2012 I served as the Wikimedia Foundation’s U.S. Cultural Partnerships Coordinator, building the infrastructure to support Wikimedia partnerships among cultural institutions in the U.S. In this role, I kick-started the GLAM-Wiki community within the U.S. by hosting a GLAM Camp in Washington D.C. I worked together with this group to establish a new GLAM-Wiki U.S. Portal that makes it easier for museum professionals to find resources and get started on a Wikipedia partnership. On the U.S. Portal, you can use the Contribute page if you’re considering what kind of Wikipedia partnership may be right for you or the Connect page if you’re looking for a Wikipedian to help.

The most important result of my year with the Wikimedia Foundation was the creation of the GLAM-Wiki U.S. Consortium. The Consortium is a network of museums and other cultural organizations combined with Wikipedians and the GLAM-Wiki community who work together to share resources, discuss ideas, establish best practices, and collectively support one another’s Wikimedia projects. We found that a number of museum professionals had themselves become experts in GLAM-Wiki initiatives, and it was time to connect these individuals with those just getting started—establishing a culture of “GLAMs helping GLAMs.” The Consortium is led by an Advisory Board of museum professionals, librarians, archivists, and Wikipedians tasked with shepherding the Consortium forward and maintaining the momentum of U.S. initiatives.

We’ve only just begun. You can join the conversation by following the mailing list and checking in on the Wikipedia page. The Consortium also hosts monthly GLAMOuts (Google Hangouts On Air) with highlights from GLAM-Wiki members in the U.S. and beyond. If you are interested in hosting a Wikipedia edit-a-thon at your museum, or if you have any questions about starting a Wikipedia project, you can introduce yourself on the GLAM-Wiki U.S. mailing list, and we’ll help you find someone in your area who can get you started.

Sometimes I find myself in awe of the community that has grown so quickly around the GLAM-Wiki initiative. In the past two years, I've watched cultural institutions go from hosting a total of three Wikipedians in Residence to nearly fifty around the world. I've been thrilled to advise museum professionals from incredible institutions across the US and watch them enthusiastically begin new projects. I’ve been humbled by the Archivist of the United States, during the 2012 Wikimania Conference keynote, proudly declaring himself a “huge fan of Wikipedians who are leading the way in connecting Wikipedia with the GLAM community.” That’s what can happen in the span of two years, thanks in part to a single blog post. I can’t wait to see what the next two years will bring for Wikipedia and for open culture in museums.

Tuesday, August 20, 2013

Today I will be live-blogging from the Tech@LEAD conference (Technology for Cultural Inclusion) at the Kennedy Center in DC. I hope to be a conduit for your participation in the event--please let me know about things you would like me to ask presenters, or report on from the sessions either using the comment section, below, or by tweeting to the attention of @futureofmuseums with the tag #TechLead2013.
You can check out the program at the conference website. This pilot event is bringing together people from arts, education, design, exhibition, media, IT, mobile development, etc., to explore how the design and application of technologies can support inclusion of people with disabilities in cultural experiences.
Here are the guiding questions for the day:

More technology in cultural and natural history institutions means more challenges and more opportunities for accessibility – what should we do about that?

What technologies, tools, models and techniques from the wider world can we apply to be more fully inclusive?

How can we focus the development and proliferation of new and existing technologies to be inherently accessible and inclusive?

New visitor experiences are coming – what should we do to get ready for them?

My questions for you (answers via tweet or comments):1) what challenges does your museum face in being accessible to people with disabilities?2) can you share stories of new tech (or new applications of old tech) that helps support inclusion?Boston Museum of Science's Ben Wilson shows me the Bytelight system: creates an indoor positioning system with 1 ft accuracy, enabling people to use their assistive personal electronic devices to access highly localized content.Will Mayo talks about SpokenLayer, a service which makes published materials accessible within 24 min by professional readers. Find that 62% of users listen all the way through the recorded material. The New Republic is now making all articles available this way. Will points out that anyone with their eyes engaged in another task (driving, exercising) is "functionally blind" when it comes to written text.Artist Halsey Burgund performs his "Patient Translations" piece created with Roundware, a "flexible, distributed framework which collects, stores, organizes and re-presents audio content. Basically, it lets you collect audio from anyone with a smartphone or web access, upload it to a central repository along with its metadata and then filter it and play it back collectively in continuous audio streams." Hmmm, sound stream of commentary from people in your museum's galleries?@nealstimler of the @MetMuseum demos Google GlassWhat applications do you see for Google Glass (or its competitors) in museums?John Tobiason of the National Park Service shows off their accessible tour apps, including the kiosk version.John says he & his colleagues were surprised at how many people are using these apps onsite for navigation & accessibility, not just interpretation.Annuska Perkins explains wearable tech: Project Blinkie Blanket. A smart e-textile driven by LilyPad Arduino microcontrollers. Proximity, touch, temperature can all be inputs to the Internet of things, triggering useful actions. On a wheelchair, for example, sensors could contribute to crowdsourced accessibility maps.Talking to Amanda Cachia about museums exploring images of disability through art. Check out her exhibit What Can a Body Do? Speaking of accessibility, the media section of the exhibits website has audio recordings of all the catalog texts.You can view more notes from the day, including some wonderful real-time "doodles" like the one below at the Tech@LEAD website.

The current feature exhibition at the Nevada Museum of Art, Modernist Maverick:
The Architecture of William L. Pereira, presents a swath of the American
architect’s most important projects from his fifty-year career, highlighting
the iconic structures he designed such as the futuristic Theme Building at the
Los Angeles International Airport (LAX), the Transamerica “Pyramid” in San
Francisco, and the science fiction-y Central (now Geisel) Library building on
the campus of the University of California, San Diego. The exhibition also
examines his quieter but no less important master plans for Southern
California’s historic Irvine Ranch, the University of California, Irvine
campus, and LAX. The curatorial framework for the show, in concert with its
exhibition design by Nik Hafermaas | Uebersee,
casts Pereira as an architectural futurist—that is, as an architect whose
greatest contributions may not have been the iconic buildings or places he
designed, but the processes of designing architecture at all scales (buildings,
campuses, cities, and environments) for future changes and needs that he could
not predict but only imagine.

Image courtesy of Johnson Fain Archives

In the mid-1950s Pereira and his then-partner Charles
Luckman were commissioned to design a new master plan for the updating and
enlargement of the Los Angeles International Airport. It was in scope, scale,
and budget, the largest project to date for the youthful partnership. Some
sixty architects and planners from the Pereira and Luckman office worked
exclusively on the project for over two years. Their task, less than a decade
after gravel runways were still in use at LAX, was to design plans for airport
facilities to accommodate the 18 million passengers the airport authority
anticipated would be traveling through LAX by 1980, and to imagine a new
airport for the Jet Age. Their proposals included plans for a large, central
domed structure that would have enabled passengers to leave their cars in
parking structures on-site and circulate through the airport and out to the
concourses without further encountering automobiles. Anyone who’s been to LAX
knows that this is decidedly not the way things work there today.

Image courtesy of Johnson Fain Archives

Pereira’s proposals also included the early adoption of
human-architecture interfaces such as moving sidewalks, flight status change
monitors, public address systems, and “pre-tuned receivers,” that bear an
uncanny resemblance to today’s ubiquitous smart phones. The airport authority
commissioners rejected or altered many of the proposed plans, and ultimately,
the Theme Building became the remnant icon distilled from the plan for the
central domed structure. Modernist Maverick presents elements of both the
far-reaching and unrealized plans Pereira conceived for LAX, as well as
elements that were built at the airport, and raises questions about the
alternate futures that might have been had Pereira’s plans and designs been
more fully realized.

Pereira’s creative and thoughtful capacity to imagine—which
is not to say predict— the future of Southern California at the height of its
post-WWII growth are why, in part, an exhibition presenting his work as an
architect and planner is of interest to CFM readers, and to people interested
in the histories of twentieth century design and architecture, generally. The
exhibition and accompanying catalogue and documentary film attempt to raise
questions as to why someone as prolific as Pereira is not better remembered
today, and to ask how architecture and planning as exhibited subjects in
museums can present histories and ideas of alternate futures—the futures that
might have been.

I visited Colin in
2011, when the Nevada Museum of Art hosted To Live Forever: Egyptian Treasures from the Brooklyn Museum. NMA created additional interpretation for
the touring show, that reflected the then-recent political revolution in Egypt.
It included speculative musings from science fiction author & futurist Bruce
Sterling, accompanied by an
80-foot panoramic mural depicting a possible future Egypt. As the exhibit
catalog noted “In much the same way that the antiquities on display offer only
traces of historical evidence helping us to understand Egypt’s past, Sterling’s
contribution and the accompanying mural illustrates one of many possible
outcomes for the future of this dynamic and rapidly-changing country.” I love
the approach NMA is taking to the historical future and to future history. Can you
share other examples of museums playing in the futurist realm? Please clue us
in, using the comments section, below.

Tuesday, August 13, 2013

A
reporter recently asked me to name the biggest barrier standing in the way of
museums adapting to the forces shaping the future. My reply was “ourselves—the
funding and organizational structures that tether us to outdated models and
failed strategies.” However unsuccessful these models are, sometimes the
barrier that keeps us from discarding outdated ways of operating is simply too
high to scale. Hence my pleasure in sharing the story of the Oakland Museum of California—a
story that illustrates how massive disruption can be turned into an opportunity
for reinvention and growth. OCMA Director and CEO Lori Fogarty has spoken
eloquently about this transformation at conferences—in
today’s guest post, she shares a brief version of the ongoing saga.

Elizabeth cited our
recent reorganization at the Oakland Museum of California in her July 11 post about the need for museums to let go
of assumptions in order to meet the real needs of their communities – up to and
including the assumption of traditional organizational structures and authority. There has been a good deal of interest in our
experiment here in organizational change, so I thought I’d elaborate on this tale
of how disruption and potential upheaval resulted in new possibilities and
ways of working for OMCA.

As a brief background, OMCA
had been a department of the City of Oakland since its founding in 1969. Funded entirely by the City for its first few
years, public support had declined significantly over the decades, and as a
result, a private non-profit entity, the OMCA Foundation, was founded in the
early 1990s to provide fundraising assistance for exhibitions and
programs. By 2010, the balance had
tilted so that City funding represented 45% of our budget and support through
the Foundation totaled 55%. The City
funding – which was declining more precipitously with the recession and
Oakland’s financial crisis – was almost entirely directed to facility
operations and maintenance and, most significantly, to salaries and benefits
for the 45% of our staff who were City employees. Even at a time when were in the midst of a
major capital project and institutional resurgence, we were facing the
potential of severe employee lay-offs due to City reductions.

Instead of viewing this
prospect as inevitable, we pursued complex negotiations to restructure our
relationship with the City, resulting in the City turning over all operations
to the OMCA Foundation while retaining ownership of the facilities and
collections and continuing to provide substantial – though reduced – annual funding. What that meant in reality for our staff was
that the City would lay-off all employees at the Museum -- myself included -- and
the Foundation would then make the determination whether or not to
re-hire. And, by contract with the
City’s unions, we were required to give six months notification of the impending
lay-offs.

While the prospect of
this kind of enormous change could have been morale-busting for employees, we decided
to seize this opportunity to truly reinvent the structure of the Museum. When OMCA was founded in the 1960s, it came
together as three smaller museums of California art, history, and natural
science, and we still operated in many ways as three museums, bifurcated even
further between City and Foundation staff.
With the City transfer, we could put this legacy aside and invent the
Museum we wanted for the future – an institution that would put the visitor and
community participation at the very core of our organization.

As the City and
Foundation Board leadership negotiated the intricate agreements that would
enable the transfer, I worked with museum organizational consultant, Gail
Anderson, and the staff of the Museum to envision what a structure for a 21st
century museum might look like. With as
much transparency and communication as was feasible during the highly sensitive
and political process with the City, we formed working groups of staff charged
with considering how we might improve processes and systems, redefine roles,
and create a collaborative, cross-functional structure in support of our
mission and vision for the future.

The result of this
process was a structure that is reflected in an org chart that is affectionately
known internally as “the flower.” The
structure incorporates six cross-functional, cross-disciplinary “centers,” all
focused on an outstanding visitor experience and participatory community
engagement. These six centers are: the
OMCA Lab; the Audience & Civic Engagement Center; the Creative Production
Center; the Collections & Information Access Center; the Resource &
Enterprise Center; and the Institutional Support Center.

New Org Chart, Oakland Museum of California

As part of the process,
we re-wrote every job description. Every staff person whose job underwent extensive
change—whether former City employee or current Foundation employee—was required
to interview for a position, which meant conducting 90 interviews in a six-week
period. With a very small number of
exceptions, we were able to retain everyone who applied to the new organization
and, at the same time, attract great new talent and cultivate new leadership. As disruptive as this process was – and, of
course, the day-to-day work of the Museum continued unabated during the months
of this transition – the restructuring enabled a fundamental and profound
cultural shift and new ways of working throughout the institution.

So, how are we doing now
two years into our organizational transformation? When we embarked on this journey, I felt we
were in a boat at sea, tossing around in turbulent waters, without a compass or
life preservers. I can now say with
confidence that we’ve landed, pitched our tent on the shore, and our new “flower”
structure and culture is taking root.

Thursday, August 8, 2013

CFM has
been exploring the future of education in papers, presentations, stories and
blog posts. Sometimes we look at mainstream futures (such as Naomi Coquillon’s
recent post on museums
& the Common Core curriculum standards). Sometimes we look at why, and
how, the learning
landscape of the US may be radically different in coming decades. Today we feature a report that treads what I
would characterize as treading a middle path—outlining how we could reform the
current system while challenging some of the core assumptions that handicap
traditional schools. Today’s guest post is by Lillian Pace, KnowledgeWorksFoundation’s senior director of national policy, who introduces KnowledgeWorks’
first policy brief—a 25 page document I recommend to your attention.

Assessments are meaningful
and positive learning experiences for students.

Students receiving timely,
differentiated support based on their individual learning needs.

Learning outcomes emphasizing
competencies that include application and creation of knowledge, along
with the development of important skills and dispositions.

A growing
number of states have begun serious conversations about how to transition to a
system that ensures students get the supports and extra time they need to master academic content and
transferrable skills. As more
states and districts explore ways to make this transition, there is an
opportunity for museums to be a very important partner in this work.

In KnowledgeWorks’ first policy brief on
competency education, An
Emerging Federal Role for Competency Education, we outline a
competency education continuum charting a district’s shift from a traditional
education system to one based on competency across several different factors
including school culture, learning pace, and instruction. It is in these areas that museums can have
the most impact. By partnering with
districts and schools to create individual learning pathways, customized
supports, and accelerated opportunities based on student interests, learning
styles, and real-time data, museums have the opportunity to be part of a
solution that will enable every child to meet and exceed his or her potential.

The
success of the competency movement depends heavily on districts and schools
being able to work with community partners as they design education systems
that put students at the center by accommodating each student’s interests and
learning styles. We hope this brief sparks lots of conversation toward this
end.

Stay tuned for another policy brief that dives deeply into
providing multiple pathways to student success through competency education
including how community-based learning can support continued innovation.

Competency
Education challenges federal accountability and assessment
policies that hinder schools from making full use of museum resources. These include reliance on standardized
testing requirements that narrow instructional focus and time in dysfunctional ways
and assume that students will all learn at the same pace. The policy brief
outline shifts that would support the creation of personalized learning systems
that enable students to build museum resources into individualized learning
plans. This hints at a future in which learning outside the classroom is
explicitly valued as part of the educational system—a future in which museums
can be equal players in the learning landscape.

Quick review: the Long Now
Foundation is Stewart Brand and Danny Hillis’ project to encourage really
long term (10,000 year) thinking. (See previous Futurist Friday post profiling
the Long Now’s Rosetta
Project.)

Long Bets are yet another way the Long Now’s inventive staff
and board have come up with to promote thinking on a long time frame. People
are encouraged to post predictions on the site regarding something they think
will happen in the next 2-X years. (X is intentionally unspecified—there is no
boundary on how far the projections can cast into the future. The most long
term projection I could find closes in 776
years.)

Here, for example is a projection on the site related to the
cultural sector:

#657: By 2030, 30% of libraries existing today
will not have walls (buildings).17 years 02013-02030. (Unfortunately the author, Susan Hornung, didn’t
provide an argument supporting this prediction, so it is hard to assess the
strength of her position.)

Predictions are vetted by a mediator to ensure it is
“societally or scientifically important” and other criteria. If someone wants
to challenge that prediction, they provide a counter argument. The predictor
can then choose which challenger to bet against. The contenders agree on a $ amount
for the bet, each designates a charity to receive their (hoped for) winnings,
and negotiate the terms of the wager. The bet is resolved when the time period
of the prediction is up, or when conditions of the terms of the bet are met,
whichever comes first. The winnings are awarded to the winners preferred
charity.

Anyone who registers on the site is encouraged to contribute
to the discussion regarding any given bet. Indeed, that is one of the major
goals of the site—to foster “improved long-term thinking.”

There are lots of predictions
about global warming (# 653, “The first
ice-free artic day (as defined by NSIDC) will occur by the end of 2020”), the
economy (#611#633, “Bitcoins will
outperform the US Dollar, Gold, Silver, and the stock market by over 100 times
over the next two years”) and transportation (#633, “By the year 2037, all driving on
highways and city streets will be completely automated, the only place to
freely drive will be specially designated tracks”).

Some projections are so technical
I would have to do background research to even know what they are talking about
(#165, “By 2040 the existence of Qi will
be accepted by the mainstream scientists, and Qi research will revolutionize
our mechanical scientific TOE into a true TOE.” Wah?)

Some are just plain silly (#86, By the year 2150, over 50% of schools in
the USA or Western Europe will require classes in defending against robot
attacks." I wish. That would've been cooler than gym.) But all together, the projections and bets make for a good read—insight
into what people think about, worry about, hope for, and (in some cases)
well-reasoned arguments for why they believe what they do.

It is particularly interesting to look at bets that have been resolved to see, with hindsight, whose reasoning was on point and why. See for example bet #3, in which Jim
Griffin predicted, in 2002, that “a profitable video-on-demand service aimed at
consumers will offer 10,000 titles to 5 million subscribers by 2010.” Griffin
was right. His challenger, Gordon Bell, argued that too many technological
barriers (bandwidth, codecs, connections) lay between us and Netflix and its
kin. Serves as a good reminder of how hard it is to correctly perceive the
speed with which technology, and infrastructure, can change.

As a side note, the project also
has a brilliant financial model. Participants pay a $50 “publication fee” to
post a projection on the site. When the predictor and challenger agree on the
bet, both deposit the amount up front into a portfolio called the Foresight
Fund, which holds the stakes. (The bets are tax-deductible, since they are charitable gifts) Half of the growth of the fund goes to support
the Long Now Foundation, and the other half accrues so that the eventual
payment to the winner’s preferred charity may actually be much bigger than the
original bet.

What makes Long Bets meaningful?

The
format and criteria encourages you to think long and hard about framing your
projection in a specific, verifiable way.

The
requirement to plonk down hard cash makes you assess your certainty about your
projection. Is it really a product of reasoning, or is it just wishful thinking?

It
fosters discussion about the projection, the challenge and the reasoning behind
both.

So, what about it—are you ready to place your own bet? I’m
formulating one about our sector (let’s see if it meet’s the site’s criteria
for being “societally or scientifically important.”) Until then, weigh in with
your thoughts in the comments section, below.

Friday, August 2, 2013

I hope by now I’ve convinced you of the benefits of reading
widely & eclectically, and of including “fringe” as well as mainstream
sources in your scanning.

Today’s Futurist Friday assignment: set aside 15 minutes to
browse a crowdfunding site like Kickstarter
or IndieGoGo to see what projects people
have in the works. This yields a
relatively unfiltered glimpse into the fringe, showing us what people THINK the
world needs, and the technology, art, events and services people actually are
willing to fund.

I do mean browse.
It’s hard to explore these sites in a highly focused way. (Though I always
check the keyword “Museum,” and scope out the IndieGoGo categ

It’s interesting to note which projects succeed and which do
not. (On Kickstarter, 56% of
projects fall short of their funding goal.) For example, the highly unsuccessful
iThings.org—Helping
Build the Internet of Things, which has raised a whopping $1,221 towards
its $15k goal when the funding period closed. Of course, a project can fail for
many reasons, including the inability of the project managers to mobilize
social media to publicize their campaign. In the case if iThings.org, I wonder
if part of the problem was that they did not make it clear whether donors were
funding a nonprofit “open community” to support IoT makers, or the production
of a particular piece of technology. (They led with the former, but all the
detail was about the latter.)

In contrast, look at Clipless.
A wildly successful campaign, its goal was $25,000 and it raised $43,890. This
project funded the creation of the first production models of a device that
connects phones, GPS or tablets to any flat surface securely & reversible.
At first seemed to me like JAG (Just Another Gadget), but on reflection, I
think the project illuminates a couple of important trends:

First—how low-cost home-based manufacturing tech is fueling
entrepreneurship. The Clipless guys produced their first prototype with a 3D
printer, but when plastic proved too flimsy, they turned to a small Computer
Numerical Control (CNC) machine to produce aluminum prototypes.

Second—the accelerating growth of the Internet
of Things. One of the attractive things about Clipless is that it incorporates
Near Field Communication (NFC) that enables the phone to “intelligently run
common tasks, based on the physical object it’s mounted to.” Translation: it can
launch specific apps, depending on what it is clipped to. (For example, you
might program the mount on your nightstand to automatically silence the phone’s
ringer, dim the display and set your alarm.)

So maybe, in terms of scanning significance, those socks aren’t
so silly after all. Both the Sensoria project and Clipless demonstrate the
desire on the part of users for seamless, integrated, wearable
smart tech. And Sensoria illustrates how this kind of tech is being harness
in the service of the growing
field of “quantified self” devices that enable you to obsessively track
everything from what you eat to how much you move to how well you sleep.

Thursday, August 1, 2013

In the first half of 2013, we're seeing a growing resentment
on the part of nonprofits about the some of the expectations being projected on to them by funders,
and the beginnings of concerted action to re-shape public expectations of
charitable performance and accountability in key ways.

Exhibit one: the OverheadMyth Campaign organized by GuideStar, Charity Navigator and BBB Wise Giving Alliance, launched
with this open letter.
The campaign aspires to “correct the common misconception that the percentage
of charity’s expenses that go to administrative and fundraising costs—commonly
referred to as “overhead”—is, on its own, an appropriate metric to evaluate
when assessing a charity’s worthiness and efficiency.” The counter argument to this prevailing view is that by equating low
overhead with responsible management (and visa versa), individual donors and
foundations cripple the ability of nonprofits to invest in infrastructure and
build their capacity to scale up. (The campaign’s Overhead Myth pledge has
2,366 signatures so far, and you can add your name.)

This “misconception” may be hard to correct, however. One
commentator recently opined that it is is naïve for the “metrics
mafia” to think that more sophisticated data can abolish the
overhead myth, because the myth is about emotion and values, not data. Its “symbolic purpose” is to assure donors
they can steer their dollars directly to impact and “expresses an important
truth about popular sentiment towards charity.”
These “popular sentiments” and their corrosive effects on the nonprofit
sector are explored in more depth in…

Exhibit 2: Dan Pallotta’s March TED talk, “The way we thing
about charity is dead wrong,” (which I summarized and recommended in a recent
Futurist Friday post). Dan Pallotta’s specialty is running multi-day mega
fundraisers for charities such as AIDS awareness and breast cancer research. In
this talk, he makes the case that our societal attitudes toward charity condemn
nonprofits to small and inefficient operations by denying them the market
advantages of pay competitive with the for-profit sector, advertising and marketing, risk
taking, and investment capital. “Everything the donating public has been taught
about giving is dysfunctional” Dan declares. This message evidently struck
a chord, as the video has racked up over 2 million views since it posted.

However irrational or dysfunctional our attitudes towards
giving, this pushback might not have gained steam if the old model of giving
was stable and productive. But these movements are taking root in a landscape
in which the forces disrupting traditional patterns of giving continue to
build.

This year’s Global Philanthropy Forum explored how digital tools and technology are empowering “indigenous
philanthropists” to bypass traditional power structures of funding and target
their giving exactly where they want it to go. The Forum emphasized the ability
of these tools to fuel innovation in the developing world, to democratize
giving and empower local populations. But while such may provide “precision” in
global philanthropic interventions (as GPF’s founder & CEO, Jane Wales
observed), in the US they may further sap support for the capacity and
infrastructure that enables organizations to effectively tackle broad needs. (Exactly
the side effect that GuideStar, Pallotta et al are raging against.) As a
college director of giving recently commented in the Chronicle of Higher
Education, “Annual funds…have become a tough sell in an age when philanthropy
has been divided into such micro units that a donor can give a tablet to a
specific fourth-grade class.”